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A ‘genre’ is a more or less stabilized and habitual lin-
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with specific communicative purposes, and with par-
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Bhatia, 1993). For instance, giving a speech, conduct-
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political genre. The category of ‘genre’ is related to
what some scholars call ‘text type’ (de Beaugrande
and Dressler, 1981), and to ‘activity type’ (Levinson,
1979). Analysis of the linguistic forms of genres
sometimes focuses on ‘generic structures’ (Halliday
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Journal of Speech 70(2), 151–167.
Miller C R (1994). ‘The cultural basis of genre.’ In
Freedman & Medway (eds.). 67–78.
Milroy L (1987). Language and social networks (2nd edn.).
Oxford: Blackwell.
Myers G (1989). ‘The pragmatics of politeness in scientific
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that distinguishes one genre from another, seen in
terms of particular elements (or ‘stages’) occurring
in a particular order – for instance, news reports in
the press characteristically consist of a headline, plus
a lead paragraph that summarizes the story, plus a
variable number of ‘satellite’ paragraphs that fill out
details. Bell and van Leeuwen (1994: 124–177) ana-
lyze ‘‘adverserial political interviews’’ in this way.
Other more cognitively oriented research analyzes
the characteristic topical structures of genres in
terms of macrostructures and macrotopics (van
Dijk, 1980). Genres also have distinctive features of
linguistic form at other levels of analysis. For in-
stance, the organization of ‘turn-taking’ (the distribu-
tion of turns at talking between participants) in
political interviews is different from that in doctor-
patient consultations (Heritage and Greatbatch,

1991). And there are genre differences in intertextu-
ality – the way one text is connected with others – for
example, scientific articles and political reports in
newspapers represent the words of others in different
ways (de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981).
Pragmatic research on genre focuses on the impor-
tance of contextual cues in the way people interpret
texts. One approach is in terms of prototype theory
(Rosch, 1973), which helps to explain why texts that
differ in their linguistic structure from central
instances of a particular genre may nevertheless be
interpreted as instances of that genre on the basis of
contextual cues – for instance, an article written by a
scientist on the basis of scientific research in a scien-
tific journal is likely to be interpreted as a scientific
report, even if it differs linguistically quite markedly
from most scientific reports (Paltridge, 1995).
Genre can be seen as one of three main analytical
categories in discourse analysis: a genre is a way of
(inter)acting, a ‘discourse’ is a way of representing
particular aspects of the world (e.g., there are liberal,
conservative, and social democratic discourses in the
field of politics, which represent matters such as so-
cial welfare differently), and a ‘style’ is a way of being,
an identity (e.g., there are different leadership styles
in politics, such as the styles of British Prime Minis-
ters Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony
Blair). Genres are best distinguished at the level of
social practices that are relatively stable and durable
over time, and particular concrete events, such as an
actual political speech or interview, can be analyzed
in terms of which genres and combinations of genres
they draw upon. Much actual political text and talk is
hybrid with respect to genres, i.e., combines different
genres together (Fairclough, 1995a,b; Lauerbach,
forthcoming).
An account of specifically political genres faces the
difficulty that the field of politics is not unambigu-
ously delimited but is socially constructed, and open
to different competing constructions. The feminist
slogan of the 1960s and 1970s, ‘the personal is politi-
cal,’ is one indication of the difficulties here. Are we
to assume a clear separation between the personal
and domestic as elements of ‘private’ life, on the one
hand, and politics as an element of ‘public’ life, on the
other? Are gender relations in the household a form
of political relation, or do political relations only
obtain between the parties and factions of parliamen-
tary politics? What about extraparliamentary move-
ments and campaigns, such as those of environmental
groups or protests against the policies of the World
Trade Organization – are they a part of politics? Is
there a clear distinction between politics and govern-
ment, or politics and media, given that government is
so much the target and focus of politics, and that so
Genres in Political Discourse 33
much of even parliamentary politics is now mediated
through the press, television, and even the Internet?
And are we to regard talk of the politics of organiza-
tions (such as businesses and universities) as merely a
metaphorical appropriation of the term, or see the
field of politics as including the many different types
of organization as well as ‘national’ politics? What
about local politics, international politics, and what is
increasingly referred to as ‘global’ politics? How one
defines and delimits politics is itself a political choice,
and it determines how one delimits the genres of
politics.
Here is a relatively broad view of politics, one that
focuses on the political sphere as a distinct and par-
tially institutionalized area of social life, and therefore
excludes household politics and the politics of partic-
ular organizations, such as schools or workplaces.
The political sphere, for purposes of this article, is
that dimension of social life in which different social
groups act in pursuance of their particular interests,
needs, aspirations, and values. Political interaction
between different social groups has both a coopera-
tive character in that there is a search for a modus
vivendi and a conflictual character in that there is a
struggle for power (Chilton and Schäffner, 2002).
They may do so at different scales (locally, regionally,
nationally, and internationally), although it is the
national scale that has received most attention in
political theory and analysis, problematically, given
the current growth of international political entities.
Politics in this sense includes the political system
(parliament, political parties, elections, structures of
political communication, etc.), but also includes
‘grassroots’ or ‘social movement’ politics, and the
‘mediatized politics’ of the printed and broadcast
media (Fairclough, 1995a). These are analytically
distinguishable but overlap considerably in concrete
events. The political sphere can be seen as the sphere
that connects the state and the lifeworld (or ‘civil
society’), and one dimension of its internal heteroge-
neity is that it ranges from stabilized and institutio-
nalized structures to unstable, fluctuating, emergent
political tendencies and initiatives. Settled practices
and vested interests precariously coexist with move-
ments in and pressures from the lifeworld, and what
counts as political (open to action in pursuance of
alternative policies) shifts as areas of social life are
politicized and depoliticized, brought into and taken
out of the sphere of politics (Muntigl, 2002).
In accordance with this view of politics, political
genres will be taken to include genres associated
with the political system (e.g., parliamentary debate,
political manifestos and programs, parliamentary
or party conference speeches by political leaders,
policy documents), mediatized political genres (e.g.,
34 Genres in Political Discourse
political news reports, political interviews, political
‘chat shows,’ party political broadcasts, political
advertising in the press and on billboards), the politi-
cal public sphere (e.g., public meetings, campaign
literature of social movements, political forums, and
focus groups). The range of genres is thus extensive,
and this list of examples is by no means exhaustive.
Most of the literature has tended to focus on particu-
lar genres (political interviews and parliamentary
debates have, for instance, received considerable at-
tention), but there are arguments for also attending,
particularly in the case of more institutionalized areas
of politics, to ‘chains’ or ‘networks’ of genres that
constitute the discourse dimension of political sys-
tems, the discourse ‘technologies’ so to speak of insti-
tutionalized politics. Thus, in the area of political
communication there are systematic connections be-
tween, for instance, policy documents or major politi-
cal speeches, press releases and news conferences, and
reports in the media, and there are regular and predict-
able transformations in language as material is moved
along such a chain of genres (Fairclough, 2003).
This article focuses on linguistic research on politi-
cal genres (including linguistic, pragmatic, sociolin-
guistic, discourse, and conversation analysis), but it is
important to acknowledge that various disciplines
contribute to analysis of political genres, including
political science and media studies. Very limited ref-
erence is made here to this broader body of research
(Dryzek, 1990; Corner, 1995; Livingstone and Lunt,
1994), but research on political discourse in general
and political genres in particular is most productively
conceived as interdisciplinary analysis in which lan-
guage and discourse analysts can make a specific
contribution to political, cultural, and media re-
search, while at the same time enriching themselves
theoretically and methodologically through dialogue
with other disciplines (Fairclough, 2000).
This articles focuses on four genres associated
with the political system, mediatized politics, and
the political public sphere: political interviews, polit-
ical speeches, policy documents, and public sphere
dialogues.
Political Interviews
Political interviews have attracted considerable re-
search interest as the genre that has been most potent
in the way television has transformed the character of
politics in the past 50 years. The history of broadcast
interview (Bell and van Leeuwen, 1994) shows a shift
from deferential journalists putting tentative ques-
tions to distant and sometimes impatient politicians,
to a situation in which journalists confidently
and sometimes aggressively quiz or try to corner
politicians, on behalf of the public as they commonly
claim, while politicians have become accomplished
television performers and even media personalities.
The boundary between politics and media has
radically shifted, and politics now has a thoroughly
mediatized character.
One body of research on political interviews
has adopted the method of ‘conversation analy-
sis’ (Heritage and Greatbach, 1991; Clayman and
Heritage, 2002). Conversation analysis focused initi-
ally on everyday conversation but increasingly has
turned its attention to institutional talk in, for in-
stance, doctor-patient interactions and news inter-
views, treating these as adaptations of everyday
conversation to fit specific institutional purposes
that reduce the diversity of features characteristic of
the latter, and develop the normal conversational
activities that are retained in specialized ways. For
instance, features of ‘turn-taking’ (organizing the
distribution and alternation of participants’ turns at
talking), which are a pervasive characteristic of con-
versation, are retained but in a distinctive form. Types
of turn are distributed according to the institutional
role of participants, most obviously in that it is only
interviewers (IR) that ask questions, and interviewees
(IE) that provide answers. IR questions are commonly
preceded by statements that are standardly treated by
IE as ‘prefaces’ to questions in that they do not re-
spond to such statements but wait for a question
before responding. There are features of the design
of news interview talk which (a) achieve the ‘task’
that participants have to produce talk for an ‘over-
hearing’ news audience, talk that is addressed to an
audience rather than addressed by IR and IE to each
other (which would position the audience as ‘eaves-
droppers’ on a conversation), and (b) meet the con-
straint that interviewers should ‘‘maintain a stance of
formal neutrality towards interviewee statements and
positions’’ (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991: 106). For
instance, ‘response tokens’ (such as ‘yes,’ ‘oh,’ ‘really,’
‘mm hm’), which are regularly produced in everyday
conversation by co-participants in the course of an
extended turn by one participant, are not produced
by IR in the course of extended answers by IE, and, in
withholding them, IR ‘declines’ the role of primary
addressee in favor of the news audience. And IR
questions that might be taken to be ‘hostile’ and
therefore in breach of IR neutrality are generally not
treated as expressing IR’s opinion but are merely
designed to solicit IE’s viewpoint. Participants in
news interviews overwhelmingly comply with such
interactional norms.
Although conversation analysts emphasize that the
norms of political interview are socially constructed
and subject to social change, they have tended to

understate the diversity and variability of contempo-
rary forms of political interview. I see this as a prob-
lem of levels, as I indicated earlier. Conversation
analysts have described a genre of political interview
that has been perhaps the dominant genre, one with a
normative power in terms of what interviewers and
interviewees tend to recognize as what they should
do, one that has achieved a certain stability and dura-
bility at the level of the social practices of politics,
which can constitute a powerful point of reference in
actual political interviews but is not instantiated in
any simple way within them. Actual events, actual
text, and talk are more diverse and hybrid with re-
spect to genres. One response to this is to distinguish
different types and styles of political interview (Bell
and van Leeuwen, 1994), but clear-cut typologies are
difficult to arrive at. Another approach is to recognize
that although there is a measure of stabilization
of types and styles (including the personal styles of
leading broadcast journalists), political interviews as
events are performances that variably, and more or
less innovatively, draw upon and combine genres
which have a certain stability and uniformity at
the level of social practices (Fairclough, 1995a,b;
Lauerbach, forthcoming).
Bell and van Leeuwen (1994) analyze one particu-
lar type of political interview, the ‘adverserial’ politi-
cal interview, in terms of its generic structure, seeing it
as made up of the following ‘stages’: (a) greeting, (b)
soliciting opinion, (c) checking, (d) challenging, (e)
entrapment, and (f) release. The interview begins on a
cooperative note, with the interviewer as host greet-
ing the interviewee as guest. The interviewer then
asks an ‘open’ question giving the interviewee the
chance to state his views in the way that he wants to
(‘soliciting opinion’). The shift from cooperation to
contest begins with ‘checking,’ in which the inter-
viewer prepares the ground for challenges by check-
ing facts and figures. The interviewer then moves
onto the offensive by confronting the interviewee
with statements that contradict or weaken the latter’s
position (‘challenging’). ‘Entrapment’ is a sort of ver-
bal checkmate, a statement with which an interview-
ee can neither agree nor disagree without damaging
his or her position. The final stage is ‘release,’ a return
to cooperation, in which the interviewer asks a ques-
tion (often dealing with future prospects or aims) that
the interviewee is allowed to answer without chal-
lenge. Some of these stages may be absent from ad-
versarial interviews – the interviewer may move
straight into challenges after the greeting – and the
central stages occur recursively (e.g., there may be
several sequences of challenge and entrapment). Al-
though the whole of such an interview consists of a
series of questions and answers, the interviewer’s
Genres in Political Discourse 35
questions vary in their linguistic form and in their
illocutionary force in different stages of the interview.
Their analysis thus moves toward forms of pragmatic
analysis, which are more fully developed in other
research (e.g., Fetzer, in Chilton and Schäffner,
2002), in which the focus is on the relationship be-
tween what is said and what is meant, and on
such specific issues as directness and indirectness,
politeness and impoliteness, and presupposition.
Fairclough (1995b) is an analysis of a political
panel interview in the course of an election campaign
between a television journalist and representatives of
the three main British political parties. The focus is on
genre hybridity, on the slippage between conventional
political interview of the type described by Heritage
and Greatbatch (1991), everyday conversation, and
an entertainment genre that at points approximates a
comedy routine. Such genre hybrids are a general
characteristic of mass media and a specific character-
istic of mediatized political genres. They are a facet of
the fluid and shifting character of the political sphere,
that is, of its shifting relations with other spheres,
including those of the media and of everyday life
(the ‘lifeworld’). Another example is political ‘chat
shows,’ in which politicians engage in ‘chat,’ –
conversational language specialized for purposes of
entertainment – rather as film stars or pop idols do
(Livingstone and Lunt, 1994; Fairclough, 1995a).
Political Speeches
I referred at the beginning of this article to the com-
mon view of the ‘generic structure’ of genres – partic-
ular elements occurring in a particular order. I also
defined a ‘genre’ as a more or less stabilized and habi-
tual linguistic way of acting and interacting. These
‘elements’ are characteristically themselves actions –
so that a genre is a way of (inter)acting, which is
composed of constituent actions. However, the as-
sumption that these constituent actions are necessari-
ly strictly ordered is not sustainable. They are in
highly ritualized genres (e.g., the official opening of
a new parliamentary session), but this is not a defin-
ing feature of genres as such. For instance, Graham,
Keenan, and Dowd (2004) analyze historical continu-
ities in ‘call to arms’ speeches from Pope Urban II
(1095) to George Bush (2001). They identify four
‘generic features’ of such speeches: (1) an appeal to
a legitimate power source that is external to the ora-
tor, and which is presented as inherently good (e.g.,
God, or the nation), (2) an appeal to the historical
importance of the culture in which the discourse is
situated, (3) the construction of a thoroughly evil
Other (e.g., terrorism), and (4) an appeal for unifica-
tion behind the legitimating external power source.
36 Genres in Political Discourse
The authors analyzed some 120 of such speeches,
and the particular realization, including the particu-
lar ordering of these generic elements, is predictably
variable.
A different approach to analysis of political
speeches is based on ‘functional pragmatics,’ which
aims at reconstructing the ‘deep’ actional structure of
texts through analysis of their textual ‘surface.’ Sauer
(2002) analyzes one of a series of commemorative
speeches (British Prime Minister John Major’s speech)
given by senior politicians on the 50th anniversary of
the allied victory in World War II. One focus of his
analysis is the ‘importation’ of textual elements into
this primarily epideictic address (eulogy), which
gives it a heterogeneous character, including a mix-
ture of genres. Specifically, these are elements of Con-
servative Party neoliberal ideology that introduce the
genre of party political speech. Sauer (p. 131) also
notes a ‘populist’ element that enters through ‘‘the
classical rhetorical technique of contrasting sublimity
with popular expressions’’ (e.g., ‘‘We are, as it were,
still rubbing our eyes after 1989 wondering if it can be
real’’), a characteristic I also identified in Tony Blair’s
speech on the occasion of Princess Diana’s death (Fair-
clough, 2000). Such ‘conversationalization’ of political
language is pervasive in contemporary politics.
Muntigl (2002) focuses on the innovative political
work that is done in major political speeches, specifi-
cally the ‘politicization’ of certain issues in the sense of
constituting them as issues for political debate, and
the ‘depoliticization’ of others. He analyzes a speech
by the European Commissioner responsible for em-
ployment, industrial relations, and social affairs,
Commissioner Flynn, in which employment policy at
a European Union (EU) level is opened up as a political
issue (politicized), but, at the same time, is depoliti-
cized by projecting the particular policies adopted by
the EU as the only possible ones, ruling out alterna-
tives. Muntigl’s analysis includes the generic structure
of the speech, and semantic and grammatical analysis
of how particular social groups and their policy posi-
tions are positioned in relation to each other. I adopted
a similar approach to a major policy speech of Tony
Blair on the ‘‘new international community’’ at the
time of the Kosovo war (Fairclough, 2000), showing
how the speech constituted ‘the international commu-
nity’ as a new and only apparently inclusive actor in
international affairs and especially military interven-
tions in the affairs of sovereign states, which could be
interpreted in Muntigl’s terms as the simultaneous
politicization of interventions on claimed ‘humanitar-
ian’ grounds and their depoliticization through ex-
cluding alternatives to the particular policies
proposed. In both cases, one can see an important
element of the action of such policy speeches in
terms of space: ‘carving’ out a new EU space
for employment policy interventions, and a new ‘glob-
al’ space for military interventions on the part of a
largely self-appointed ‘international community’ (in
effect, the United States and its allies). In discourse
analytical terms, this political genre contributes to the
emergence and hegemony of new discourses.
Policy Documents
Discussed here briefly is work on the genesis of policy
documents within the EU (Wodak, 2000), which
draws attention to a complex collective and nego-
tiated process of production associated with this
genre (as also with other political genres, such as
political news reports). Successive drafts of the poli-
cy document were debated and altered in the EU
Competitiveness Advisory group, which consists of
representatives of the employers and the trade unions,
as well as some politicians and bureaucrats. This
analysis locates this one genre as an element in a
chain or network of genres (including committee
meetings, expert opinions, documents of the EU Com-
mission) and points to relations of recontextualiza-
tion between such genres, and to the characteristic
transformations that take place as elements are
moved from one genre (e.g., committee discussion)
to another (e.g., the policy document). One aspect of
these relations of recontextualization is their ‘filter-
ing’ effect: things that can be said in a meeting cannot
be directly recontextualized in a policy document.
Public Sphere Dialogues
My fourth example illustrates most clearly the poten-
tial of interdisciplinary research on political genres.
The foundational work of the social theorists Jürgen
Habermas and Hannah Arendt on the public sphere
has made it clear that the question of the public
sphere is centrally the question of what forms of
dialogue are available for public deliberation. Their
work has been developed by Dryzek’s studies of ‘de-
liberative democracy’; the final chapter of Dryzek
(2000) can be interpreted as a normative discussion
of the genre of public sphere deliberation or dialogue.
None of these theorists is a linguist, so what they say
about public sphere dialogue is merely schematic
from a linguistic point of view. However, their work
can be ‘operationalized’ in the analysis of actual dia-
logues in a way that fruitfully combines social theory
and analysis of discourse and genre.
The ‘critical’ analysis of discourse has often focused
on negative critique – a critique of the dominant
forms (including genres) of discourse. However, part
of the objective of critical analysis is also ‘positive’

critique – the normative specification of alternatives,
not in a purely hypothetical way, but on the basis of
forms that actually exist, if often in a marginalized
way. In the case of public sphere dialogue, one can
specify normative generic conditions on the basis of
(to give the familiar term an ironic twist) ‘best prac-
tice,’ and evaluate actual dialogues in terms of these
normative conditions (Fairclough, 1999). On the
basis of the theoretical work on the public sphere
discussed earlier, the following characteristics of
good public sphere dialogue can be specified:
. Regulation: maximally open to diverse discourses
and voices, interaction jointly managed by all par-
ticipants
. Emergence: new individual, collective (as members
of groups) and universal (as citizens, and human
beings) identities can emerge
. Action: as Arendt (1998: 200) puts it, ‘‘power is
actualised where word and deed have not parted
company’’ – good public sphere dialogue leads to
action, has effects on the world
Although these characteristics are formulated in an
abstract way, their presence or absence in dialogue
can be measured in more precise analytical terms – for
instance, with respect to the first characteristic, the
form of management of interaction can be specified in
terms of features of turn-taking. The third character-
istic points to the question of how public sphere
dialogue is positioned in genre chains or networks,
and it indicates that particular institutionalized
regimes of governance have a partly discourse char-
acter – specifically, in this case, the existence (or
nonexistence) of systematic procedures for feeding
public dialogue and deliberation into policy-making
processes can be seen as partly a matter of the exis-
tence of established relations of recontextualization
between the genre of public sphere dialogue and the
genres of policy making.
Conclusion
A vast amount has been written on political genres,
including traditional and more modern forms of rhe-
torical analysis of especially political speeches. This
article has drawn selectively from more recent re-
search. I highlight two characteristics of political
genres that have been relatively neglected but are
crucial if genre and discourse analysts are to make
an effective contribution to political research.
The first is the fluid and shifting character of polit-
ical genres, their hybrid character, and their openness
to new forms of hybridity. Politics is in a sense a
‘space between,’ a social sphere that, on the one
hand merges into the structures of the state and the
Genres in Political Discourse 37
market, and, on the other, connects with the more
open and diverse sphere of the ‘lifeworld,’ everyday
life. Relations between politics and business, media,
leisure, and so forth fluctuate as part of processes of
social change. For instance, there is a common view
that the ‘official’ politics of the political system has
become moribund as states have begun to function
more as facilitators for the emergent ‘global’ form of
‘hypercapitalism’ – real policy options have ceased to
exist, old differences in political ideologies have be-
come meaningless – and one can see the increasingly
mediatized character of politics, its increasing focus
on leaders who are effective television personalities,
its preoccupation with image at the expense of politi-
cal ‘message,’ as discourse facets of what are arguably
structural changes.
The second is the interconnection of political gen-
res, the relations that are contracted between them in
genre chains or networks, the relations of recon-
textualization that obtain between them, and the lin-
guistic transformations entailed when, for example,
material from committee meetings is recontextualized
in policy documents. This focus accords with the
partly institutionalized character of politics as politi-
cal system, including pressures to incorporate the
public sphere (e.g., the contemporary integration of
‘focus groups’ into the political apparatus) and ‘life-
world’ politics (e.g., various originally activist NGOs,
which have become institutionalized). The political
sphere is germane to the constitution of ‘regimes
of governance’ on different scales (‘global,’ macro-
regional, e.g., the EU, national, and local), which
regulate (with varying degrees of success) social inter-
actions, relations, and identities. And such regimes of
government have a partly discourse character, which
is best captured by seeing them as distinctive net-
works of genres. Especially in the context of increas-
ing ‘globalization,’ in which such regulation operates
with extreme rapidity across vast distances of social
space and across scales, networks of political genres
are an inherent part of regimes of government.
See also: Activity Theory; Conversation Analysis; Critical
Discourse Analysis; Discourse Semantics; Genre and
Genre Analysis; Media, Politics, and Discourse: Interac-
tions; Political Speeches and Persuasive Argumentation.
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Georgia: Language Situation

B G Hewitt, SOAS, University of London, London, UK former Autonomous Region of South Ossetia (capital
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Tskhinval), to the south of Russia’s North Ossetian
republic across the main chain of the Caucasus moun-
tains. Georgia’s population (as of 2004) is lower than
Georgia (capital Tbilisi) officially occupies 69 500 the 1989 figure partly because of post-1991 emigra-
square kilometers in northwest Transcaucasia. It tion (non-Georgians leaving largely because of ethnic
lies between longitudes 40
050 and 46
440 east, and
latitudes 41
070 and 43
350 north, bordering the Rus-
Table 1 Main population of Georgia (1989)
sian Federation, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and
the Black Sea. The last census covering this entire Ethnic group Population (no.) Population (%)
territory took place during the final years of Soviet
rule in 1989. The main figures are presented in Whole Population 5 400 841 100
‘Georgians’ 3 787 393 70.1
Table 1. Armenians 437 211 8.1
But two areas have been de facto independent of Russians 341 172 6.3
the central government for most of the period since Azerbaijanis 307 556 5.7
the collapse of the USSR (1991): the former Autono- Ossetians 164 055 3.0
mous Republic of Abkhazia (capital Sukhum) in Greeks 100 324 1.8
Abkhazians 95 853 1.8
the northwestern triangle of Transcaucasia, and the